Tuesday, February 15, 2011

After ‘Jeopardy’ - The Boston Globe

A snapshot from the author of a recent book about Watson; also see this article for results of the first round

There’s no guarantee that Watson’s technology will provide the question-answering technology for all the industries IBM has targeted. Maybe competing companies or IBM itself will come up with cheaper, smarter, or more flexible systems. But a new generation of language-savvy machinery will soon be hunting down answers for us. Some will be wrong, some stupid. We human beings, exercising our still-unparalleled brainpower, will be the judges of that. Once you regard this technology as a powerful supplement to human cognition — and not a replacement — Watson suddenly starts to look much friendlier.